Jennifer Lawrence had a very successful early career. By 20 she had her first Oscar nomination. By 22 she had her first Oscar and her first franchise. (Before all that, she was in the main cast of The Bill Engvall Show.) But before she landed The Hunger Games, she tried out for another franchise — and was “immediately” told where to go.
“I auditioned for ‘Twilight,’” Lawrence revealed on Spotify’s podcast The Rewatchables earlier this month (as caught by Variety). It didn’t go so hot. “They turned me down immediately. I didn’t even get a callback.”
Lawrence said if she had gotten Twilight, whose first film came out in 2008, her life would have been “totally different.” In fact, after seeing how the public hounded the actress who did get the role, Kristen Stewart — not to mention Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner — she came close to turning down Katniss Everdeen. She said she “almost didn’t do Hunger Games because Twilight had come out and that fandom had happened.”
She, of course, did do The Hunger Games, but it took some thinking.
“When I was trying to talk to people about making this decision after [Hunger Games] got offered to me, it was hard to explain to people… this level of fame,” Lawrence explained. “I assumed it was going to be the Twilight level of fame and that was never something I had in mind. I never wanted to be the most famous person on the planet. That’s a very different life than I pictured for me.”
The Hunger Games still catapulted Lawrence to superstardom, and she still had to “counteract the franchise-ness” of that decision. But it doesn’t sound like it ever got to Twilight levels. In fact, she said she imagines still have to deal with mega-fame had she done Twilight.
The one-two punch in 2012 of The Hunger Games and The Silver Linings Playbook, for which won an Academy Award, did make her huge, but she was famous for two very different things: a hugely popular franchise and a hugely popular drama-comedy. Now she can do whatever she wants, including making an old school raunch comedies and getting “violently” sick on her recent episode of Hot Ones.
(Via Variety)